Business Management

Every session of teaching is compared to an instance of public speaking. As with the audience at public speaking event, the students in a classroom session want to follow the content with ease and comfort, learn something new and carry home the happiness of having acquired a new insight. They characteristically abhor the teacher and his session if the required care is not taken to facilitate them to follow and imbibe the contents, no matter how spectacular the contents of the lesson are. Students want to learn without being smothered with confusion or unrelated content. They, by nature, expect the flow of content to be within their stride. They want the flow to be smooth, humorous and juicy. They are willing to learn new things on the basis of their existing conceptual knowledge. They, moreover, want to be involved in the class and seek an opportunity to employ their mental faculties. In the following discussion, several strategies to make the students really enjoy their class time are weighed.
There is no alternative to preparation. Preparation is the key to success of every session. A teacher, no matter how long his experience is, has to prepare well. The only blessing for the experienced teacher, needless to say, is that the preparation time is less and it is in indirect proportion to the length of experience. The focus of preparation is determination of the conceptual contents, examples, logic among concepts, key words and the correct statements. One should not expect to get ideas on the spot or depend on such spontaneous ideas that may or may not cross the mind during the session. In fact, when the preparation is good, one can recall relevant anecdotes spontaneously and quite naturally.
Textual lesson should be adapted to the level of students. A professor should not heavily depend on the textbook whose contents may not be up-to-date and may not be relevant to the level of the students. Besides, the arrangement of concepts in the text book may not be as logical as they should be to match the level of a given group of students. The professor should set a ‘proper lesson logic’ in the contents. The best practice is to take each concept or point and link it with the previous point. This can be best done by ruminating or rolling the points in mind over and over.
As Maxwell says in his famous work Psychocybernitics, the teacher should prepare for session in his coolest and quietest time unhurriedly, yet with deep involvement, but during delivery he should leave his presentation to the spontaneity. In such a case, the delivery is more creative and ‘juicy’. A student enjoys when the flow from the teacher is natural, and also when the student does not find the teacher at a loss for words or ideas. All this is possible only with a proper preparation.
Introduction to the topic sets the tone to the lesson and hence very integral. A student can get interested in the topic of the day only when the introduction is adequate and easy to follow. All the fundamental concepts should be explained in the beginning itself. It is needless to say that the student should be convinced about the importance of the topic. The teacher should stress how the topic is useful for scores/GPA or practical life. Most of my sessions, as testified to by the students, prove successful because of this principle involving explanation of purpose of the topic.
Examples should be taken from real life. The examples should be from the contemporary and familiar field or from every day life. All these examples should be thought out beforehand, no matter how routine and less complex they may be. The teacher’s own experiences work well to make the point. A constant self-questioning like ‘does this make sense to them’ will help cite right examples. The teacher should rehearse within himself several times the points and the related examples so as to attain clarity and logic between points. Even arithmetic or less complex sums should also be worked out in advance.
The professor should use synonyms for difficult words and make statements more than once to help the students understand.
Questioning and discussions make the lesson lively. Points which are fairly less complex should be thrown open for discussion and the students’ faculties be challenged by the appropriate questioning.. A teacher who is deft at questions can keep the students interested in the lesson while minimizing the number of yawns. Yawns are a straight measure of a boring presentation.
The teacher should use proper body language, intonation of speech, rhythm of voice etc. I think a teacher who can sing or dance with very moderate body movements can make the presentation more intriguing. Besides, he should maintain eye contact with every student while moving from time to time from one side of the dais to the other to give fair attention to every student.